There were four of us, ladies in desperate search of metropolitan culture, going to the opening night of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in Denver. We live in Lander, Wyoming, about 350 miles from the nearest city.
Nancy, the driver, is a Latin language expert, and a culture aficionado; she speaks a few languages and has been to many cultural centers of the world. In the front passenger seat sat Edie, who is a young grandmother and a native of Lander. This was to be her first opera experience: brave lady. Aileen and I were in the back, two escaped mothers.
Ours was a motley crew, but we like each other a lot and we have the faith in common, so in that love, all our differences become fascinating journeys into real education. As we drove south out of Lander, the snow lightly falling, Edie taught us about our environment and the creatures- well, the strange doings of people, actually. That’s most what women are interested in. That and food. So we did stop for chocolate as she regaled us, saying a jaunty “Happy Valentine’s Day” to the Rawlins-mellow store clerk (the wind blows so hard that they just stop trying to be jaunty). True to feminine form-or substance?-we played the game, “You Are What You Eat” with our choice of Valentine treat. I was a colorful, hard shell with sweet, cheap chocolate on the inside; Nancy was a hard, shiny chocolate shell with a tangy, powdery milk substance; Aileen was a soft, chocolate cover with crunchy nuts and chewy nougat; and Edie was, simply, nuts.
Edie told us about Lander as we drove on past cultural black holes like “Grandma’s Café –Open”, the kind of place you’d make a horror film about a family from New Jersey stopping there to use the restroom.Edie knows mysterious things like the restaurant in Lander where they leave the side dishes out all night and serve them the next day (important info for the rookie); the Maverick station (where you get good snack food) which was once a dumpy trailer park with a sandwich shop in front. So that plot of land always had a sandwich charism, and now it is fulfilling it completely- no messing around with trailers. The next-to-best story was of Amoretti’s, a beautiful old building and former swanky Italian restaurant on the corner of Second and Main. After a year of twenty-dollar, lacy salads and such, the owners just- left; locking the door, they left the place ready for dinner that night. For weeks and months afterward, Edie said you could still look in the dusty windows and see the fancy place settings, the wine glasses slowly being covered with dust. Lander’s own Great Expectations…and finally, the best story: a WyomingRomeo and Juliet: I said, remember, Wyoming style: In Hudson, a town near Lander built around a curve in the two-lane highway entering Shoshone and Arapahoe reservation territory, there is a sign that says: “This is the greatest food in the world”. I was busy laughing about that and the “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop” when Edie chimed in, saying, “It really was great food.” The restaurant in question was El Toro, now defunct like Amoretti’s. “Was it Mexican food?” I asked. Edie looked at me in that Wyoming way, just a straight look. “No, it was steak.”
“Oh”. I remembered that this is Wyoming, not California. Edie went on: “El Toro and Svedtler’s were in competition..”
“Was Svedtler’s Mexican?” (I was trying to needle her.)
“ No, Svedtler’s is a German name.” Another straight look, and she continued, “..anyway, these two places were in competition-“
“Two steak places competing in a town with the population of about 50?!”
“Be QUIET, Tami!!” Chorus now.
Edie tried again: “Well, El Toro’s was by far the best. Then, the owner of El Toro’s married the daughter of the owner of Svedtler’s.”
“A Montague- Capulet story! What happened?” exclaimed gentle Nancy. Edie replied in her no-nonsense Wyoming tones, “El Toro’s owner just lost interest in his restaurant and closed it.” There was silence for a few seconds.
It was Nancy’s turn to educate us. She had a collection of CDs; Turkish medleys, Mexican Baroque-“Mexicans do Baroque?” I asked, displaying my shallow-ness- and the best, an Italian Michael Bolton-type. We put him in and he started crooning, “Senxa una donna” (without a woman). The snow was falling now more seriously, and we were on Interstate 80, climbing over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne. I looked up from my book, Peace of Soul, by Fulton Sheen, and saw the big patch of slush just before we hit it. We started fishtailing at fifty-five mph, and Nancy tried to correct us so we didn’t go off the edge of the highway, down into the trees and rocks in the gully along the highway. In the next instant, we were spinning. For me, it became slow-motion, like when your spider-sense kicks in. Zanchurra the Italian was still crooning and Nancy was yelling “Jesus”, Aileen was praying “Hail Mary”, Edie was frozen, and I was- what was I thinking about? The median wall charging at us and the strange similarity of feeling to a Tilt-A-Wheel ride.
We slammed into the median wall at about 50, and the Tilt-A-Wheel, true to experience, flung us the other way. Suddenly we were driving forward again, and Nancy got us off the road. We all looked at each other, checked poor Aileen’s head, felt our bruises. The car was smoking from a smashed-to-hell engine, so I told everyone to get out so we could check it. As we surveyed the scene, trucks filled with kind, wide-eyed Wyoming tough guys came to help out. They pulled car parts off the highway and smiled at us. We felt better, and just so thankful for being spared. Nancy said flatly, as a huge semi roared past us, “We could have been hit”. The Tilt-A-Wheel image exploded, except that I mused, based on our last thoughts, that Nancy would have been going to see Our Lord, Aileen would have been in the arms of Our Lady, and me? At the eternal Tilt-A-Wheel? That sounds like hell. In my shock state, I was worried about this for awhile.
The Wyoming HP came, the wrecker came (car was totaled) and I got a ride in the back of the patrol car, in the “perp cage”, furthering my worry about my eternal destiny. But I was jolly enough to take a picture of myself and hope for God’s mercy on a frivolous soul, a soul not always in reality enough at the important moments of life. Like the last one.
We got to Laramie, Wyoming’s second or third largest city (not saying much, since the largest, Cheyenne, has only 53,000). Everything on a Saturday closes at noon in Laramie; so we found ourselves with Chad and Misty and their kids, Edie’s family, riding into Cheyenne over the same pass on which we’d crashed.
Nancy: “Well, shall we go to the opera?”
Aileen: “Let’s find out the weather conditions.”
Tami: “We have to take down Denver, remember?”
Edie: “I am going to stay in Cheyenne.” She hugged her grandson.
A few hours later, three of us got a rental Chevy Cobalt from a metaphysically sleepy Avis agent at the- I must say it- absolutely pathetic excuse of an airport that is “CheyenneInt’lAirport”. I drove. Before leaving we hugged Edie and her family, our rescuers from the wilderness of Laramie, and began our culture-seeking, Frodo-esque journey once again.There was black ice, there was the 7:30 curtain-up deadline; there was the unknown city maze of Denver- the white sharp-tooth mountains rising in the distance; there was the ominous warning of the Cheyennites of “traffic always in Denver”: but we steeled ourselves, thinking of the pioneer women who “did whatever the men did and had babies”. We pulled up to the Grand Hyatt, and the pioneer woman metaphor could go no further. She stayed at the door, her skirts flowing in the wind, looking at us ruefully.
Rushing into the elevator, we were almost bowled over by a man who was holding his chest and calling out for Our Lord. “Alright”, I thought, “there’s a theme going on here.” We called over the hotel staff and he assured them he was fine. “Just a cramp!” he yelled. We continued on up to our room, got ourselves dressed, down again, and got into a taxi. I was expecting a “New York rush” as soon as I got into the taxi, but instead I got “Denver doldrums”. We could have walked faster.
We swooped into the “Ellie Caulkins Opera House” at 7:30 on the dot, transformed into preened peacocks, a far cry from the forlorn little sparrows next to a smashed car. We drank red wine and had a chocolate cookie at intermission, mingled with ball-dresses and very cool, orange-vested western tuxes, and with frightening mini-skirts on sixty-year-old legs and with well-painted, ordered faces. We watched a large man rolling around in exotic silk dress on the stage singing about lust (and I wondered at the ironies of high-culture); but there were a few moments of true sublimity in sound.
After the opera, we decided it was time for dinner, at 10:30 pm- how European of us- and we also decided that we needed a drink-how Western of us-and so we settled ourselves in a hopping Denver place off 16th St. I made the mistake of having two glasses of wine, which I later put down to pure shock.
We made it back to the Grand Hyatt, and I consider it a great feat that I made it back balancing on little tiny heels. I must have looked like Barbie when you try to make her stand up. As we entered the lobby, Aileen wisely asked about Mass times for the following morning. I thought the surreality of the day was done, but I was mistaken. The man behind the desk, an otherwise typical Colorado boy, asked jauntily, “Well, do any of you speak Latin?” Unbeknownst to him, with us was Nancy, who is probably the ONLY person in a thousand-mile radius who speaks Latin, and fluently. She said, “Ecce boalpoh f lpofpom” (that is what I heard-two glasses, remember?). The bewildered bell-boy said to Aileen, as if Nancy was a foreign personage, “What did she say?” Aileen quipped, “She said, ‘You are handsome’”. The bell-boy, red, looked at Nancy and said slowly, “Well, you’re sort of beautiful.”
As we were lifted to the sixth floor, Nancy said finally, “I guess after forty you get compliments like that. Sort-of beautiful? What is that?”
The next morning, we got ourselves to the Holy Ghost Church for the Latin Mass. We walked into a stunning creation in mahogany and brown marble, with the redeemed Garden of Eden painted and carved into the walls and trimmings; the candles near St. Therese, St. Joseph and Our Lady burned with a strong and gentle light. Our souls were feasted in glorious musical courses: Faure, complex Kyries, the choral voices perfect with ordered passion. The columns, standing like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the main apse, seemed to sing as Our Lord was raised in sacrifice.
“Here” I thought, “is high culture.” And I thanked God for my life, and asked Him to order my soul.
Later, much later, as we drove through the beautiful, open, endless rolling grasslands and eerie, fortress-like rock formations, I remembered Brandy at the Cheyenne airport, a young girl we’d seen while in our rental car fury, on our high-culture search, a girl traveling on her own. She had a shaved-looking head, a beautiful face, and she talked loudly, with Midwestern pancake-tones in the “Cloud-Nine” bar about her back-yard lake in Michigan. We were busy rolling our eyes at this young pup, when we heard an old Wyomer say to her, “You got such a pretty face, young lady, what’s with the hair?” She gave him a sparkling smile. “I was diagnosed with cancer in September, and I lost my hair. It is growing back though,” and she patted her own head affectionately. “It is finally starting to lay down.” The bar fell silent. We fell silent.
As night slowly fell outside the window of our traveling car, as I remembered Brandy, I looked out to see the stars. Out there, in cattle land, cowboy land, the stars are not poking through like pinholes in an opaque black paper sky. They are in the millions, taking over the expanse, and the sky is not flat, but full-form space, and the stars hang down in the living air, within reach like ornaments on invisible strings: millions of tiny glass ornaments, reflecting a light from another source. I felt simultaneously, after a weekend with the theme of approaching death, very earth-bound and yet still desirous about the door to beyond those stars.
Above all, I did not strike the flint to make the spark that is my life; the spark is given me to help start a fire for God in this world. Someday, I pray, in His hands, my spark will float up into the night, disappear, and light up in His heart again.
Driving close to home, through the sad town of Shoshoni, we played the “You Are What You Eat” game again. I was dried out, cured, heavily peppered flesh, Nancy was a Dinty Moore stew, ‘hot and substantial’, and Aileen was, simply, nuts.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Ring the bells that still can ring, forget the perfect offering, there is a crack in everything that's how the light gets in.
I am a mom, with all the duties of daily life shooting at me like tennis balls from a serving machine; often, I am happily keeping up with each ball: dishes, wham! homeschooling, wham!dog-ate-paper-towel-roll clean-up, wham!
Sometimes, in life, a ball comes flying in from some other court and suddenly I am on my rear with tennis balls flying past me (the machine doesn't stop for surprises).
I found myself more solidly on my rear recently- this last surprise ball flew past, and I watched it like one would a shooting star across the sky; I didn't even notice the pummeling I was taking from the machine balls. I turned back to face the machine with little more than raw will. Kid with pink eye, dirty floors, disinfect bathrooms, dishes times fifty, dog eating furniture, messy yard, tutor, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham-wham. I must have looked like the Road Runner playing tennis. But mysteriously, the machine turned off- or it lost its verve. Because of that last, curving ball, I was left with a sense of silence and retreat, even as I continued parrying with the duties of my life.
From within that retreat, a place of struggle, I somehow was given the grace to begin to be grateful to God: but in simple things, like the swirl of a cloud, the spread of stars, a bird on top of a pine tree sticking out his breast- childlike things. I also noticed from this retreat little details like the repeatedly wet shoes I found on my porch: children's shoes; my childrens' shoes. In a normal time, these presented themselves as only tennis balls to hit and move on: now I stopped to wonder what they were doing. Could I be grateful for these wet shoes?
Thanksgiving Day, my nine-year-old daughter, Ana, started talking to me about Delos, Minith Tirith, and the journey across the river. I was listening more intently than usual, because I was in a retreat. At the mention of the river, seven-year-old Sophie joined in with, "It is so cold, Mom!"- and like a puzzle piece, the wet shoes on the porch fit. Aha, I thought; but I did not start with the usual questions about wet shoes, from my mom-laundry-mold problems perspective. I just listened. "Can you come with us today and see Delos?" asked Ana.
We got on our bikes and coats and gloves and hats- and started out on the commonplace road towards City Park. On the edge of the Popo Agie river, we parked our bikes. I was worried about the bikes getting stolen, but the girls just looked at me and shrugged, and I, because of the retreat in my heart, no longer cared. Instead, I looked down the hill towards the gently dancing water, and asked, "How do we get there?" I followed them down the hill, through bracken, reeds bowed by the last snow, and little mirrors of frozen water. We reached the shining beach of large river rocks, sunning themselves in their break from being the riverbed. The winter-river was not deep, but running and very cold. We were to get across by stepping on stones. I noticed, in my new observant and docile state, that Ana and Sophie were intent on getting across, and the coldness of the water did not bother them in the least. "That's cold", Sophie said, in the same manner as I would have said about a flower, "That's pretty."
We picked our way across, holding onto the grey, spindly branches of a tree which hung submissively over the river. I learned from the children that your feet actually stay warmer if you just get wet in your shoes and socks. I'd forgotten this short-sighted wisdom of a child in the throes of adventure. Climbing up the hill, I noticed bits of man-made cement holding back the dirt, and felt a sadness, like the breaking of a spell. We were yet in a land where the spirit lay fettered in practicalities and trash. But Sophie said, "Here's a good, flat rock to climb on- hey, lookit this wire in it! COOOL!". It was cool.
Ana had run ahead to a blackened-bark, old tree whose branches, never pruned, reached down heavily to the ground. It made a network of little rooms, and in one, the children had placed an old bell or something upside down as a decoration. It looked pathetic on one level, but through their eyes, it was the treasury of Minith Tirith. I was shown Neptune's frozen pond, and we journeyed further towards our goal, Delos. As we neared it, I could feel the childrens' excitement building. Ana, in her odd mixture of practicality and imagination, was our tour guide, showing us all the solid paths, and at the same time, saying things like, "I don't know if Apollo will be there. Maybe Artemis. She's usually around." We approached another un-pruned tree, branches bowed to the ground, but forming a huge space, the size of a small circus tent. A deer bounded out, and I could see that we'd disturbed her nesting space. At the entrance, Sophie and Ana picked their way into the center of Delos. I hung back, looking in. "Come in, Mommy"; "Yeah, Mom, come in! Do you like it? Do you?"
I still hung back, smiling, and remembering my Deloses from childhood. There was a branch with many spindly fingers reaching across the open space in the middle, with a strange, drippy green moss hanging from each digit. The sunlight filtering in made the green sparkle like emeralds; jewels of Artemis. I stared at this unexpected beauty for a moment, and I said, "I love it. But if I come in, I will break the spell of this place. I am admiring it, but I am a Big Person." Their eyes shone, because they knew somehow that I was affirming their world, by respecting it enough not to enter.
As we walked past the frozen pond, I noted that there was another pond completely unfrozen. Instead of thinking of what chemical quality of the different ponds made one freeze and the other stay fluid, I noted quite casually, "Perhaps the Ice Queen froze this pond because it gave her no fish, and the other one did." Four eyes shone brighter.
Deep in the spell now, we maneuvered our way back across the ferocious torrent by the log bridge, using a special balancing stick. No one noticed that I nearly broke the child's bridge, but I was roundly cheered upon my leaping to the other side, as if I'd got across the Amazon by swinging across on a vine. I was then treated to the super-duper hill in McManus Park, and I got the ultimate compliment: "Mrs. F- would never do this- we're lucky to have you as our mom."
On the way home in our wet shoes, toes frozen, we stopped to pet a cat.
Do not,in your sorrow or joy, not see the child's world for the balls, I told myself as I peddled home, looking at the massive mountains in the distance.
I just came back from Santa Barbara to Wyoming- like going from what Eden might have looked like to the mountains of the moon; winter is setting in here, that strange time of year when the skeletons hanging listlessly on doors in the wake of Halloween mirror the bony trees: trees slowly falling asleep in their wait for the gentle fingers of spring.
In a way, I am traveling that path also; now here in Wyoming in normal life from being in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara! -cutting pepper tree and bougainvillea in the mountains above the city, sneaking around my old college campus in the estates of Montecito, weeping openly at Butterfly Beach (no one notices the tears because the wind, like the hand of the Lord, wipes them away to join the passion of the wind off the water): in short, plugging in very suddenly to an old life in which I was a passionate young woman- disturbed, at times, but passionate.
Standing along the beach wall on Sunday, saying goodbye before taking to the road north, I remembered that when I was living here in Santa Barbara, I was full of passion- but a passion alternately unfettered and unreasonable and then clamped by terrible fears of consequence and punishment. Now, as I watched the waves pound in, I remembered also that this kind of passion led me to be a slave of Thanatos:
And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods." (Hesiod, Theogony 758 ff, trans. Evelyn-White, Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.)
Thanatos is the twin god of Sleep, twin children of Night and Darkness; and because I was a slave to my passion, I would, at times of destruction and fear, desire not to live, which is our modern understanding of Thanatos: a seizing, iron desire for final sleep. I loved deeply and passionately (I was not promiscuous, which by its nature cannot be passionate) as the Lord made me to do, but I did not know how to love with balance and without fear; thus, it was not a perfect love, for “perfect love casteth out fear”. I did not love the way the Lord would have us love, freedom within His will, His laws.
I left Santa Barbara once before, twelve years distant, completely dried out from tears; I could not cry anymore, so in the grip of Thanatos I was then: I do not know how I left, only that I was, in a way, slowly guided; a carrot here and there, and I was in graduate school in Annapolis; soon I was, girl-like, twirling on a wide campus lawn leading to the Severn River, alone in the gentle, falling snow at ten pm after a glorious class on Homer; I was in the Adoration Chapel at St. Mary’s at two am, laying on the floor and weeping again in the arms of the Lord, letting go my loss. I was slowly being released from the death-grip of that bronze demon.
I lived, then: drank deeply of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Euclid (who would have thought math could be passionate?), taught, loved my students, married, had three children, came out of my shell because of the deep love and friendship of a few holy people, and began to create. I began to understand deeply Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I understood this in terms of God loving and not myself, for I had bent with removers, the deepest of failures- bent to have love removed from fear, mostly, a fear of not living up to what I was expected to do and suffering because I did not understand what was written deeply inside me; nor, at the time of my life in Santa Barbara, had I the saving balance, reason and teaching of the Faith- and my love and other's for me had been destroyed. How does one live with that knowledge, with that depth of failure in the deepest parts of life?
In the years that I began living again, I understood how God loves us: He looks upon tempests and is never shaken: and He began to teach me how to love that way, through suffering and discipline, through times of poverty on many levels; through His gift of Himself in the Eucharist and His gifts of children and family. I was in a school of love, and I know enough now after all that the love of Sonnet 116 is impossible for me to attain, to live- to the edge of doom?- and that it cannot come from any power in me.
When I returned to Santa Barbara this time, rather innocently for my aunt’s wedding, I was looking forward only to time alone and a chance to meet old friends and family. I did all that, and it was blessed; but I did not know that I was to meet myself in a mysterious way again, to revisit that passionate young woman that I was, to look back on her decisions with some horror but mostly sympathy and a deep and unexpected sense of terrible loss and regret, and through the eyes of others who knew me inside and out, to love and appreciate who I was then, while yet taking into account my disorders. If I had known better how to love, if I had known better how to be balanced…this time I saw clearly the loss, because I understood better what love was and could have been, and have never felt pain like that before.
So I stood at Butterfly Beach on the day I was to leave, watching the surfers and remembering that time I’d sat on the beach, twenty-one or so, and had asked God why I couldn’t sit and talk with Him, face to face; and the next minute, a man came up to me and said, “Can I sit with you and talk?” Not knowing who this guy was, and being ripped from my reverie, I said, “No”. Even though this may have been some pick-up, there was a lesson in it for me, I knew. This was me in a nutshell- asking God for everything in my deep way, like jumping into the blue and purple ocean not caring that I couldn’t swim, and then shrinking back in fear from any decision I was supposed to make, and then rolling around in regret and uncertainty afterward.
I stood there, now forty, and remembered that because of this agony of uncertainty, there was a deep current of thanatos in me, which is the mark of the truly depressed, and a mark of deep self-absorption. I began to weep for the destruction and disorder this had caused; I wanted to ask forgiveness from everyone I’d hurt and disturbed, especially those whose lives had been most deeply affected by me, and yet felt helpless to ever repair it all. Thanatos came and stood there by my side, but I recognized him and stared him in the face.Then from somewhere inside me (yet from somewhere outside of me as well) I heard, in that deep language which has none of the boulder-heavy quality of the words we speak, but rather the honey-ness of deep realities: “I want to LIVE”.
I got in my car and pulled away from the beach and up 101 towards Santa Cruz, caught in the grip of that thought. I realized that although I had been schooled in the discipline of love, I had perhaps quashed some of that passion I’d had as a young woman- basically, in order to survive: but I wanted now, because of that school, to live- to live now without fear. To live truly is to love perfectly- and passionately.
I do not know how to do this, but I do know that it must come from Christ. That is all. I know now that I want to burn up in a fireball- not in the way of Thanatos, but in the consuming fire of the love of Christ. I love the Sacred Heart, the Sacre Coeur, because He is described as an ocean of love, or a consuming fire, two images which are fundamental to my life. I understood finally the deep desire for martyrdom, the desire for the greatest love: “for no man has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend”. I realized that the passionate person that I was made to be, better schooled now that I am, can desire no less than a fireball of love. So now I want to die, not in the arms of Thanatos, but in the fire of Christ, without fear. I want to supernaturalize my loves, and may destruction and regret and loss be burned away and love restored.
However, I cannot do this. My nature wants it now, wants not to wait, like a woman in love cannot wait for marriage, admitting no impediment; but this kind of love, I now know, the best kind of love, is dependent on the will of God. I understand St. Therese of Liseux better, perhaps: I think her greatest pain was not to be immediately consumed in this fire- she was, like me, made to be passionate at a deep level. Instead, she was consumed by tuberculosis- on a natural level- but God supernaturalized it, and with Him, St. Therese supernaturalized every action of her life, from picking apples to dying of suffocation slowly. This IS the heroism of the saint, and yet I am, as she describes, a weak bird in a storm who is looking for the sun. I am no longer afraid, except of sin and of my own weakness: or perhaps I should not be afraid of this weakness, for does not God work most through our weaknesses? Perhaps the one thing of which I am afraid is to live a passionless life, buried in the humdrum of bills and cycles. St. Therese, in her Little Way, I pray will teach me.
I ask now to be consumed in His fire, like a meteor across the sky, but I know it must be in His way and not out of a selfish desire. This will, I think,be the next school for me.
We drove (the cattle) into town in the beginning of June. At least, I felt both like we should be driving cattle, and that we were cattle, after forty or so hours in the Blue Donkey.
Lander does not rise elegantly into the mountain range; we came in from the southeast, and never have I seen so much lonely and brown-tone space, sad places with desperate names like "Sweetwater"; places along the Oregon Trail where I am sure many silent and unmarked corpses lay- remains of those brave hearts, the innocent and weak who died of exhaustion and thirst after months, not hours, in their wagons. I looked across this high desert on our way to Lander and felt absolutely naked and lonely and empty- and afraid. "Hell's bells, what if this is what Lander looks like?"
Suddenly, as we sped through the hot afternoon, the road slithered like a rattler in between red-rock canyon walls- we were goin' down. As we went down, I saw the Wind Rivers raising their heads off in the distance, snowcapped, green-swathed, looking like huge forms in royal robes but ever turning away, with their robes fanned out on the high desert scrub plains. They are mysterious mountains, with much promise of adventure spilling out of their canyon-gateways.
Lander is snuggled in a valley amidst the folds of the Winds' hems. Coming in from the south, the road widened in a proud way, and the sign which said "Lander" had an iron silhouette of a prairie woman on it. "Good", I thought, "that'll be me in a couple years- maybe less, depending on how hard it is."
In the evening, we were taken to our temporary accommodations, the "Dillon View Apartments", on Dillon Road. I wondered why on earth you'd name an apartment complex after the view of the road it is on: I might be wrong, but this kind of thing says something about Wyoming- so practical that it is funny. Or maybe Dillon is that great, white peak of a mountain with his one eye always on us. Anyway, we settled in, glad for a bed- even if there were only four beds for five of us. I had, after all, learned something in Canada: simple gratitude- and I would not trade that lesson for anything. Au revoir, Canada (until re-seeing).
We spent our first weeks in Lander among the working poor, next to the Family Dollar store, McDonald's and a gas station, which for some reason, played rock music from various speakers night and day. We met our first friends in the apartments: David and Debbie, a son and his mother (she was managing the complex), who were trying to make it without alcoholic Dad and another brother. David is a gem of a kid, who tries to make up for his complex life by telling us stories of his horse. It conveniently got killed when our kids wanted to go and see it. Nonetheless, David and Debbie made our first weeks joyful- water fights, climbing trees, kickball with a pockmarked nerf basketball, the works. It was truly joyful, like the face of God peeking through the scrub brush.
We saw the Indian families who are trying to make a life off the reservation, working long hours and very infrequently out for a leisure walk. One family had the strange habit of opening their car door without looking to see if anyone or anything was in the way. We all learned the Dillon rule #1: Never park beside the white SUV with "Roman" and Indian feathers on the back.
In Lander, I noticed right away that there is still a very strong racial divide- in appearance as well as daily life- between the Indians and the cowboys' descendants. There are many blond and blue-eyed Scandinavian types, with delicate features, and they cut quite a contrast with the wide-cheek-boned, dark and braided Indians. I felt that under the modern veneer of jeans and cars, I was still looking the Old West right in the face: and like my first months in Canada, I sensed people tougher than myself. I remember being at City Park with the kids at the same time that about a hundred Indian children were there, kids in The Shoshone Boys and Girls Club. We were there for about an hour, and as we were leaving, a nearly lone blond kid, about five, dressed to the nines in a cowboy outfit, came ridin' in on his bike. I couldn't help thinking that he was about to get scalped.
The Indians, I am told, are a people heartbroken. Looking at the high desert, the mysterious peaks of the Winds, the canyons and arching sky, I wondered if their heart was broken because they could be nomads no more. This country seems to call for the nomadic spirit; and the Indians seem to carry a certain frustration in their black eyes; a certain shift in the reflection of the light conveys this. I saw a photograph of the Shoshone Powwow Queen, or something like that, and she stood proudly dressed in white leather Indian wear next to a bareback horse, on a rock in one of the canyons- and I saw what they would like to be, instead of the heavy, Cadillac-drivin' misfits they often are. Sound harsh? I'm becoming a Wyomer already. However, there are those Indians who still live, to some extent, the spirit of this country: The highlight of the 4th of July Rodeo was watching the Indian relay races. To see them going full tilt bareback, and jumping off midstream to alight with elegance on the next horse is an eye-opening experience. To see them cheered raucously by every Wyomer there is a great experience.
The cowboys, on the other hand, are tough people full of surprises and practical jokes. I was at McDonald's, sitting rather dog-eared by the infernal PlayPlace, when I noticed two cowboys exit a massive truck with a cistern tank in the back and a horse trailer behind- how much equipment do you need? Anyway, ears suddenly up, I noticed another cowboy sitting near me. I eavesdropped (cultural research, of course). The conversation was between this old, rusty cowboy and another guy and centered around the expected: water levels and fishing spots... the the old guy, tough-looking, mentioned how he was 'a fixin something and was havin trouble. "Yeah, yeah", I thought. The other guy asked him what it was, and he said, "Well, its my damn sewing machine- stitches a couple stitches and then jus gives out- can't seem to get it right." The other guy, sympathetically, "Oh, I'm sure it'll come out alright." I couldn't figure out if they were serious or knew I was listening.
The local gas station is named "The Maverick" and the nice inn in town is "The Pronghorn". Doesn't make you want to stay there, does it? Speaking of pronghorns, there is a mysterious yard absolutely filled with horns of some deer-thing. When I saw that, I wanted to throw up right there. There are the NOLS types: granola, crunchy, tasty (oh, sorry, went too far with that one) types who know all about survival but usually nothing about salvation. There are the country-club types who drive souped-up Cherokees and Land Rovers, and I wonder, "Why are you here and not in Santa Barbara?" I guess in Santa Barbara they'd be living at the "Whatever View" apartments, and they know it, so they stay here.
Don't get me wrong, I like it here: there is a saying which I think has truth in it: "Wyoming is as America was". There is an adventurous, open, friendly, realistic spirit which, I think, fires the ancestral blood in me. My father's white trash family came West in the 1800s, to become something more than that trash label they had in Illinois: they came West through these deserts and mountains, and became ranchers in Eastern Washington. They were the blue-eyed, tall blonde people I see here. Some say I must have Indian blood, too: one day, I wore my almost-black hair braided down the back as I often do, and I was ridin' my iron horse, Diamond Back, through town, imagining the wheel tread sound was the sound of pounding hooves. I was eight again; suddenly pulled from my fantasy world, I happened to see some Indian kids on the other side of the road. Seeing me, one of them slowly and deliberately put his hand up in the "How" sign. I realized that they thought I was one of them. How different-and lovely- that is.
Howdy, Wyoming.
image: www.flickr.com : "Darkness, Darkness 8" by Crick3
So now, Barry’s Bay, I am saying goodbye. In the last few weeks and days, I have been reminded both of our pilgrim status, the cross, and the “edge”.
When I first arrived, shocked and exhausted- and reluctant- I remember Fr. Terry, the biker-turned-Byzantine priest, telling me in his bear-like way, “Welcome to the edge”. It frightened me and thrilled me at the same time. The edge turned out to be a place from where I could see past the comforts and joys and temptations of this life. I have a memory in my mind of Fr. Terry pointing out the hill beyond our little dilapidated house, a lone, treed hill overlooking the rat-a-tat of pale little houses surrounded by yards beaten to death by weather, ski-doos, four-wheelers and toys. He pointed to that hill and told me it would be beautiful in the winter; and then he encouraged me that I would see beyond that, even, if I trusted God.
The edge turned out to be a place of well-placed little crosses for me to carry: financial panics, the grind of buying everything and only things on sale and otherwise cheap; battling anonymous arms for things at St. Joe’s thrift shop; a culture and community which seemed inscrutable to me for months; Canadian bureaucracy; losing a couple teeth; burned arms, root canals, sledding accidents and April still buried in the cold; and the ever-flapping housewrap-“Polish siding”. And finally, a very large cross: losing two precious students. This was a cross we all shared, and it seemed to break down barriers and open hearts all round.
Up until the point of the loss of Janine and Paul, the crosses were there to strip me of attachment to the comforts and beauties of this world. I’d imbued so much pressure to be and appear as the world would like without even knowing the extent of my attachments. Our Lady’s Valley, the area surrounding Barry’s Bay and Combermere, was a place where a mother’s hands gently but firmly stripped my soul. The cross of losing Janine and Paul was rather a cross for all of us in this community to carry together-it was too heavy to carry alone-but for me, it was a sort of completion of one part of my journey of attachment to this world, like a lodge halfway up a two-day hike: for both young people seemed to me to exemplify the idea of the Christian pilgrim, which necessarily carries within it the element of detachment. In their flight away from this world, culminated in their deaths, they hammered home the point to me that our home is not here.
With their deaths on the lake, another temptation to attachment was taken from me. When I first came here, all I wanted to do was to settle on MaskIsland. It seemed like another world to me, and how I love the water! After the accident, that was taken from me as well. Nothing here seemed beautiful to me anymore, especially shrouded in the death of winter. It was sometime round then that my sight began to change, and I understood what Fr. Terry had been telling me when I first arrived. Sometimes it is those seemingly innocuous temptations that hold our sight on the wrong things.
At first, it was St. Hedwig’s which seemed more and more beautiful; it was as if a light emanated from the place- the darker things got around me elsewhere, the lighter the church became. Then it was the faces of my students, my fellow teachers, the kindness of the lady at Afelskie’s and the flower lady at Value Mart, and my neighbor down the road on his funky new bike. They began to be luminous, just like my memories of my short time with Janine. I began to converse with Janine regularly, asking her for help in how I should see things- and truly she had already helped set the seeds for me for a better sight; for before she died, she had asked me, me already too burdened with tasks and roles and life in Barry’s Bay, if she could help with the Little Flowers group (which I had resisted starting). She broke that barrier, and I began to serve a little more, rather than looking at my own problems. My sight changed as the direction of my looking changed.
I know more now about the disorder of this place, as there are disorders in every place. But with my sight changed, I saw the miracle of God living side-by-side, almost with the filth on Him, as He works to change hearts and break down the barriers of disordered poverty, pride, selfishness and fear. I know, from my life in many different places (six or seven countries now), that this disorder is everywhere; but here it seems more naked in a way: in California, for instance, it seems to be nicely covered with a veneer of good weather, health and wealth (except if you visit the produce-picker’s shacks in Salinas). In general, here there is less to cover it with, unless someone becomes the ultimate block-head and tries to cover it with the veneer of holier-than-thou poverty or Jansenistic spirituality.
After a year, after the Canadian winter and a winter of the soul, I am a pilgrim a little more, in a hurry on the road to God, less interested in delaying for the temptations along the way (as Divine Intimacy puts it). I am definitely less attached to my teeth and more concerned with the words of love which I can get past them and my attempts at the abeyance of selfish ones. I rejoice in the beauty of God’s house and the souls who crawl in on spiritual knees: I saw with real eyes the widow with the mite, and the little children who came close to Christ. I do not weep over the house I live in, but rather the loss of knowing, day-to-day, the beautiful souls I knew here.
However, I believe that all born-or re-born- in love does not die, nor fade. Both my look into the hearts of a few young students, who were making the miraculous effort(borne by grace) to turn to God, and my deepening knowledge of those farther along the way to holiness was a catalyst for greater love- and now, greater loss in a sense. But to lose sight of our brothers and sisters in this life means naught in the economy of the spirit. In fact, I think we can love purely if we simply keep praying for each other. This is the meaning of our life here: that is, to be pilgrims in love with God and those He loves; and the Cross in some way makes us pilgrims- for while we carry our crosses, we can’t carry anything else.
I went to a ‘mass’ recently, feeling a little curious as to how the ‘liturgy’ might come off, and what I might learn about the people involved. As soon as I sat down, the small congregation started singing, “…the animals came in, two by two…” I thought it a strange hymn, seeing that this was supposed to be Easter Sunday. I tried to sing along as best I could, although the style was rather informal and thus hard to follow.
The priest came in, processing perfectly and reverently. He seemed rather nervous, and I surmised that it was because the audience was, I guessed, a very critical one and made up entirely of the feminine. I wondered how this congregation made up of little women would treat the young priest who seemed so serious. As I thought about this, the priest reached the ‘altar’ and kissed it. He then turned around and put his hands out, moving them quickly to a prayer position, almost as if he was grabbing something in the air, and said that the mass was offered for “Granddad”. He blushed and stood there.
Then, there was a long silence, and I realized that no one knew what to do. A little lady from the congregation jumped up from her seat, came up to the altar area and faced the congregation. She read, “Dear Brothers and Sisters, be nice to one another.” As you can imagine, my reaction was one of shock, wondering what translation of what book this was. After the reading, she sang alleluia about eight times! and when she was done, the priest did the strangest thing I have ever seen. He went over and pinched her cheeks, shaking her head back and forth. It was a strange mixture of affection and annoyance. It was a natural reaction, I thought, amidst the yelling of the congregation, to the over-done alleluia( even though it was reverently and beautifully sung- eight times) and the obvious attempt by the cantor at a mass coup.
As the cantor retreated to her seat, the priest went over to the lectern area to say the gospel. He did the signs of the cross on the forehead, mouth and heart perfectly and with reverence. He started: “Jesus said to his disciples, I mean, he told them”- he was interrupted by the cantor from the audience, who shouted, “He always says that for the gospel!” At this new insurrection, the priest went into the aisle and stubbornly began his homily, which was: “There will be an Easter Egg hunt after mass.” The cantor still heckled him, and finally he took matters into his hands, shoving her back down into her chair.
Things soon settled down, with my help. The communion hymn was a slight different rendition of the “animals” song- very apropos in a delirium-induced way, to the congregation coming up for ‘communion’. I guessed that this was some sort of Protestant communion, because I didn’t catch a consecration. Or maybe they just forgot. I was beginning to leave, when a new problem came up. It seems that the priest was taking communion over and over, and the congregation, who were themselves taking communion over and over, were protesting. They were a rather hypocritical bunch, I thought.
At this point, we stopped the mass, and had a little discussion about what is actually done with the Host after Mass at the church. The priest, who was only four, nodded his head. The rebellious cantor wasn’t really listening, already off on her six-year-old journey into something else. The eight-year-old looked at me, almost winking in her aged understanding of the realities of Mass.
The experience left me with some interesting thoughts about the nature of male and female, and their relationship to true liturgy. Women are nurturers and helpmates, they have a great desire for procession and order, for beauty and correctness. However, they can tend to take over if authority or proper understanding of hierarchy is lacking. Women are caretakers and they should be caretakers of the simple and central reverence of the priest. Often, they are hungry to be a part of the center of Christian life, the Mass, and are seemingly relegated to observers only. However, this does not have to be, nor does having women exercise their nature as caretaker and helper, of nurturer, have to mean a struggle of authority and proper roles. It is easy to see, at least for me, that men can withstand the rigors of the public eye, with less attention paid to themselves- they are, by their more simple physical form, less of a focus for the eye. They can stand in front and yet still be ‘to the side’, so to speak. We see this quite clearly in the comparison with a disordered male, that of the flamboyant male.
This is not to say that a “chaste and humble woman” like the woman of the Proverbs, is not possible- for she is a woman whose beauty shines from within, from her actions and her prayer life. When you meet a prayerful woman or man, you begin to understand the saying, “In Christ there is no male and female”. This kind of woman can be anywhere and be reverent, and as unobtrusive as the prayerful man: but in this world, where there still is a sharp, almost caricatured difference between male and female, I believe the Church has maintained gender roles within the Mass out of a realistic understanding of the need to communicate and model these roles to the world. This is for the good of all who are in the world, and looking at the Church from the outside, but also for those of us who are “in the world but not of it”.For me, this solves the seeming paradox between “priesthood of believers” and the traditional priestly role of the male within the Church, a paradox which has given rise to so many errors-especially within the Protestant communities- of interpreting Holy Scripture in a way which confuses the role of men and women in their communities. I am glad that the Church is there, through teaching and Tradition, to show us things which are often too deep for us to understand-except at a very simple level.
I believe, and this is my opinion of course, that Jesus modeled this delicate balance of treating women as equals (in a way never before experienced before or since) and the different roles of men and women, in an understanding of the limits of human understanding and nature; and showing in practice “a bruised reed I will not break” by knowing how much those in the militant Church and the world could understand, both being wounded by sin and the disorder of original sin.
However, women can and should exercise their nature in the community of the Church, in the Body of Christ. How? By doing things which are conducive to their feminine nature. The best sacristans are often women, and this job of caretaking for the Lord’s House is a foundational one for the community. If the House of the Lord is barren of the little touches of care that a woman can best bestow, the message to anyone who enters this place is that this is not a home but an institution; that no one could live here, day in and day out, as the Lord does.
In many churches, I have seen beautifully embroidered altar clothes, prie deus, and vestments. Flowers and plants with liturgical significance are arranged with care and delicacy around statues and the tabernacle; and the church is clean and cared for by unseen hands. Is this less important to the Lord than the men who stand in the public eye? Is the priest more important than the woman who cleans or replenishes votive candles?
The Church does not, in terms of holiness and spirituality, make a distinction between men and women. Both men and women are saints, both men and women Doctors of the Church- there are great woman theologians and, most importantly, the most precious saint in the Church is the Blessed Mother. Her role and her humility alongside the crown of glory given her by God, is the best example of a woman in the Church.
A description of the Christian life which I have long mused upon is the title of a book: The Upside-DownKingdom. For me, this is the answer to the feeling of many women who would like to be more a part of the public liturgical life of the Church. “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first”; and “ who wishes to be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven should make himself the least”. Some of the greatest mystics in the Church have been women: when one looks at the community of saints, those whose stories we know, the glory of God in both men and women-not in a hierarchy of male and female, but rather in a hierarchy of humility- one understands a little more.
* Title of a book about which I can remember nothing else.
A pure heart is one who seeks God totally and fully; one who loves deeply and feels the pull of many things, yet still seeks, as in St. Louis de Montfort’s term, “God Alone”.
How many of us have seen or lived with a pure heart or have one ourselves? How can we ever really judge the purity of our own or another’s heart? Yes, impossible. God alone judges this; but we see and know glimpses of this purity in our lives, whether it is through the intimate experience of another or in our own moments of truly loving God. Through a very special experience of one of my students, I have learned that purity is a state of being won through habitual and courageous practice of virtue; and a death to oneself in order to live for Christ.
I met Janine when she came to my class the first day: well, actually, I didn’t notice her because there were so many students, and many more compelling or colorful, with great laughs and well-thought-out comments: she was rather a quiet presence just to my left, her long and thin fingers still on the paper, or quickly writing a note here or there. I began first to notice her smile, a little like a child’s (with a wrinkling of the nose). Her smile was genuine, from the eyes, and she would laugh or smile and give a look of some amazement, her small, black eyes widening (I never figured out what the amazement was, unless she was simply amazed at the things I got myself into in the way of joking).
Then she came to my office one night, to talk about a paper. I could tell she was very focused, with a cultivated sixth-sense for discipline. I was a little uncomfortable because notwithstanding the discipline, she seemed so very fragile and unsure of herself, and I wondered if she would make it through the rigor of the academics. She surprised me first with the quality of her work: her purpose was clear and her thoughts were succinct and genuine.
I asked her and another student to house-sit for us because I implicitly trusted her, and when we returned they surprised me with the tiniest, sweetest notes for my children, little encouraging statements for each of them; and further, she had ‘done a poustinia’ in our house: a time of fasting and prayer. I began to realize that she had a depth I’d not guessed at, and also that there was a goal in mind: not a mercenary goal, but a goal of love, and like St. Therese of Liseux, she did deeds of deep love in very small ways- so small that one might easily miss them altogether.
My next surprise came when she asked if my daughter would like to visit the elderly home with her and some other students. Every Sunday, the little group visiting the elderly grew, and Janine, I surmised, was not quite comfortable with either taking little children or speaking to older people who may or not be feeling well enough to be greeted. But she went anyway- and not in her soft-spoken, often unsure words, but rather in her actions, did I begin to ascertain a certain something which inspired me. What was it that lived in her, which belied the easily-ruffled waters on the surface of her being?
One night after class, we had a passionate discussion of the journey of the soul, as we studied it in the character of Odysseus, and how the Greeks were able to see certain truths even though they did not have Christ. To my shame, I can better remember my own words than hers; but I felt a sense of illumination and a joy in our meeting of the souls: for great literature can provide these meetings, when the souls are open to truth. Janine, my deep interlocutor during that short conversation, was passionate about the pure beauty of a human search for truth and discoveries of the heart.
A few nights later, I was trying to staple numerous pages together for a class, and I had all twenty-five or so page-piles laid out on the library tables- except for the front couple tables, where a dark coat and bag lay. Janine came in, and I apologized for the interruption of her studies. She tried to read for awhile with the noise of shuffling papers and my suppressed moans when the stapler began to malfunction. She noiselessly got up and asked if she could help me. I resisted for a second, and then something in her demeanor, something beyond sight or words made me understand that this was a gift to me and that I would do well to enjoy it. So we shuffled papers together and chatted peacefully. I always felt completely safe with Janine; she was a person with whom I was totally myself: ages, stations, backgrounds, none of these mattered: what mattered, it seemed to me, was the desire to love and be loved. I must admit that there are very, very few people with whom I feel completely myself.
The last time I saw Janine, she was a quiet observer within our small group chat after First Friday Mass and the louder ones of us were bantering about the cultural impact of the Rolling Stones and “Badger, Badger” You Tube videos. I didn’t even realize that Janine was there- it was dark and she was so quiet, and I am at times absorbed in my own wit- until the group broke up, and I saw her curled-lip smile. I smiled back in peace- and we waved goodbye. I was hoping that nothing we’d said had ruffled her delicacy, but I was glad to see her just hanging out; and I remember thinking that she was going past another boundary of what was perhaps not comfortable to her: bantering. As her face receded, still smiling, I turned away to make sure the kids were getting into the car. It was the last time I saw her.
The next day, Janine got a ride to spiritual direction, and there was a decision to go via the frozen lake. She and another student drowned when the van went through the ice.
In my grieving, the image of a delicate, pink rose keeps coming to my mind, wafting up from my soul, and from my memories of her. It is the kind of rose that waves a little in the breeze, at the end of a gentle and flexible stem, a rose of surpassing softness and transparency, a rose with a scent which requires all other scents to be purged before one can really experience it.
Janine, God’s pink rose, may have had imperfections I did not know about, but she gave me a powerful example of purity, and the very real struggle for it. She was focused on God, it seemed to me: all her actions, all her service and her joys seemed bent by an indomitable will towards Him. This clarity of purpose and desire required her to be courageous: she had to go past what was comfortable, and she wanted to because of Love. She had to say no to attachments and desires, fears and natural dislikes, in order to say “yes” to God. She did it, with some trembling sometimes, but she did it nonetheless. I learned from her that purity for God requires courage.
She was such a paradox of rose and iron: but this paradox melts away when seen in the light of pursuing Love Himself- for “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” You see, I think that this Love is so gentle, but to do all these things, to be truly gentle in the winds of this world requires a purity of heart, a heart for God alone; and this, in turn, requires a strong will to say, over and over, “I want to do what You want. I want to believe in You. I want to hear only Your voice.” In those choices of the will, there must be God-given courage; and what results is Christ in the world again: even if He is taken again in some way, as He was, I think, when Janine died in the days just before Lent.
I will LIVE, I will LOVE, I will ask for courage to have a pure heart- and I will hope to continue to know Janine through the bridge of prayer.
The snow lays light on the ground, and I walk in the sunlight, feeling the prick of the cold on my ears: but I don’t care. It is the sun shining which keeps me hatless, regardless of the stripped trees, dying grass, the houses with their windows and doors wrapped up against the chill.
I am thinking of you, my friend: there is no one to replace you, no one who spoke into my life in quite the same way; and the sunlight on my light-starved skin reminds me of you in wordlessness. For what was I but a parka-encased soul, holding out against all the possible elements, when you softly and lovingly entered my life?
I look over the lake, subdued and white like a bride, and to the shores of the island, the tiny, far houses and trees bending towards each other in their winter dress. They seem like my memories of you, far and almost indiscernible. I cannot remember your smile, and I cannot remember even the exact color of your hair or your eyes: but I can remember the clothes we used to trade back and forth, and the flow of your handwriting, or your strong hug at the airport the last time I saw you. Strange, that what remains clear are those things which functioned as connections between you and me, like the causeway across the lake to the distant island. What remains living?
I feel my skin responding again to the precious, ephemeral wafts of light; and I feel like Iulus, with the divine fire crowning me: you convinced me to start un-wrapping my soul, and I remember being able to do so because you loved me. But yours was the kind of love, I remember, that showered itself freely wherever you went. Perhaps you never knew what you did for me, as you passed through my life, dancing through my winter landscape and scattering sunlight everywhere.
There is a kind of remembrance, like a footstep in snow, which gets encased in the ice: still living water, but frozen. Like ice on the surface of the water, these rememberings are lighter than seems possible, and they wait in one’s heart for those moments when they are needed. They are little pieces of you, which in the thaw, water my soul for the spring; they have become an integral part of the new growth there.
Also there is the remembrance of God: in His ever-spring, our philia – our friendship made pure by baptism in the fire of Him- lives on. So it is that you live on in my life, my friend, who loved me even when I was ugly, even when it seemed you were the only person to see some value in me, even as I was busily burying myself in snowdrifts. You are part of the green shoots in me, rising towards God. No matter what has happened to you- whether you are still on this earth or not- something of you lives on in me, and will, I pray, bend forward to meet you again in eternity.
I think that the “Cross of Combermere” has something to do with detachment. It seems that this area was picked from the ice age as a place for the cross and thus a chance, a chance for detachment; for as soon as the glaciers scratched their way south, taking almost all the good topsoil with them, and leaving rocky hillsides and blue-eyed lakes, it became a potential place for poverty.
And so it was; when the white men came, these lands were the leavings. Polish and Irish suffered here and became tough in their strange lives of the beautiful and the miserable: and then Catherine and Eddie Doherty came, two people accustomed to wealth, who were now establishing a spiritual center for the ministry to the poor. Then their vision seemed to develop into a deep understanding of Christ and His choice to be poor with the poor. Catherine’s old Russian memories of the poustinikki, men and women who gave all they had to retreat into silence and poverty, began to develop in her soul and she understood that her early visions of helping the poor were just the beginnings. As she established her dreams of silence and union with God, she understood that it must be in the context of poverty: the poustinia of Madonna House, in my mind, are little gateways, chances for the individual to have a taste of the spiritual road to God: a road, where, “The Son of Man has no place to lay His Head”. Walking with the Man of Sorrows is must be on a lowly dirt road, a road empty in the night where one must look for a place to lay for the night, stomach rumbling, feet sore: but heart full.
And so I, with my half-heart: half materialist, half spiritual longing; I, with my torn heart, have played on the outskirts of the true life. I am driving on that dirt road, wondering if I can indeed park my comforts, get out, and walk with Christ. I have not felt strong enough, or worthy. And how I love nice things, love beauty; my eyes have not been blinded enough to the world to see the beauty of God. Here, under the Combermere Cross, I have been mostly afraid and angry. I don’t want to have to be afraid of every bill; I don’t want to have to go to shop at the thrift store. I remember shopping in San Francisco and New York and feel sick. I’ve had to work at not looking at our forlorn house and imagining what I would do with it if it were mine and I had some money.
However, something inside wants union with God: this has never really changed; and I understand now that it is because He wants this- of all of us. Love desires union. So I have, all my life, done things with half of myself, dragging the other half (which is screaming and threatening dire consequences) in search of the beauty which is beyond sight, of the love which is beyond the capacity of my heart. I believe, too, that this is the condition and desire of every human heart, and remains so. I don’t believe this desire can ever be fully expelled or ignored, but living a torn life causes disorder and unhappiness. A choice must be made.
I look now more closely at what the half which longs for God is doing; and it is easier to look at it here, under the Combermere Cross. No matter where I go, whether we are called to stay here in Barry’s Bay or not, God called us here to be under this cross, and to understand poverty by living in the beginnings of it. Relative to what I have seen around the world, we are rich. But relative to what we are used to, and God knows this, we are poor. We are wimps and God knows it and is merciful to our pathetic crying: but merciful enough, also, to keep moving us closer to the ideal.
I see St. Francis in my mind; the missionaries and saints, and Mother Teresa: and I see a depth of freedom in their lives and actions that is beyond what any king or dictator enjoys. Yet it seems that I am still watching them work out their salvation in Christ- from the car. When Father Terry told me in the beginning of my pilgrimage here, “Welcome to the Edge”- I felt that I was finally getting out of the car- but then I get back in; ride, back out; walk a few steps and get scared.
I finally understood one night, after tears of deep frustration, that it was about detachment. So I went to the church to pray- it was locked, Our Lord inside. I sat in the car, literally, but my heart was outside waiting for the Lord on the road. As I looked at the lonely cross outside the church, I asked Him to begin to teach me about true detachment; and I begin to understand that a person can be as owner-minded and thus prideful about being poor for the sake of the kingdom as he is about having human power and riches. “What a minefield along this road to God”, I thought; “-if I am going to be prideful, I might as well be rich and at least provide well for my children (and myself)!”
Pride is the deep enemy within ourselves against union with God. “He resists the proud”- and how often I have felt this resistance. Poverty, then, is essentially a thing in the soul- and it cannot be an end in itself, or it simply becomes another petty idol, a place of pride, worse than that of the rich because it is under the veneer of spiritual advancement. Poverty is about detachment, of treating nothing as if I own it- because if I own it, I begin to love it; it is a physical extension of myself (Divine Intimacy). I must be detached from things, and this journey along the dirt road of poverty must be essentially a journey where one puts more and more down along the side and continues with less and less (but with more and more room for Christ).
Detachment itself cannot be the end, because then we would be Buddists only, and God wishes more than nothing-ness for us, He wishes to give us Himself. Detachment is the condition under which God can come to us, when we are becoming places where the proportion of our self to His Self matches reality, matches heaven. When we are full of Him, we are most ourselves because we give glory to Him who needs none, but is Glory Itself: and thus, as St. Paul says, “We go from glory to glory.” Giving glory to God who needs none from us is really about changing ourselves into someone more like Him, who is Perfection.
The crosses of life,whether they are Combermere Crosses, Santa Cruz Crosses, New York Crosses, or African Crosses, are gateways. They are chances by which we may begin to detach from the beauties and comforts of this life, in order to see God and thus to bring real beauty into the world, a beauty which glories in God and shows others His love: from simple flower gardens to solid family life, to a love of philosophy and literature; like the songs of St. Francis or a beautiful painting done by a happy child, or the halo of light that the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge saw when he visited Mother Teresa’s House of the Dying (Something Beautiful for God).
I have been here in Ontario two months, arriving timidly in the humid and stark days of August and now facing the sultry and mecurial weather of October. I am waiting for the cold, like a soldier in the trench looking for the first sign of movement out across no-man’s land.
Life goes slow here, with small “Combermere Crosses” laid on from time to time (Combermere is an adjoining town wherein lies the Madonna House). It is a place I want to run from one day and to embrace the next: just like the Cross. The town of Barry’s Bay is roughly in the shape of a cross: St. Hedwig’s at the top, near the lake; our neighborhood one arm, the lake area houses another arm, and the business district the bottom. All of this placement seems appropriate, too.
This area, about twenty or so miles square, seems like a spiritual powerhouse: it would look like New York City if the spiritual elements of life were truly visible. Sixty or more years ago, Catherine Doherty came here to start Madonna House, and her vision of people from all walks, including artists and scholars coming to this area is fulfilled. Families and single people are drawn here, some rather mysteriously, from everywhere to pursue a life of simplicity and spiritual poverty.
Catherine Doherty came here because it was most like her native Russia; but it is a strange little place with its own history of great beauty and great hardship. This was the area of Ontario least wanted by the first settlers- so the poor Polish were given it: the only place in the world where the bedrock is so close to the surface that it is visible almost everywhere. Good for enthusiastic geologists, bad for farmers. Some or other ministry of the Canadian government considers this place uninhabitable, even to this day. So the Poles built their lives one heartbreak at a time, and built out of that suffering very beautiful and majestic houses of God. Their lives were simple, and poor, and religious. Families were strong, and are strong. Perhaps their poverty of spirit drew the notice of Our Lord and He built the present apostolates upon it. Here it is as if the world is Catholic and the secular culture is trying to sneak in: exactly opposite of everywhere else I’ve been.
For me, I feel like a soft-bellied rookie here- these people are tough. They roll their eyes at me when I tell them where I am from(where am I from?).The Catholic immigrants, of the last sixty years, drawn like bees to the Madonna House spirit, are not tough Poles for the most part. But they are serious counter-culture and fighters- from a young mother in her bohemian-blue, solid cabin-farmhouse to a man-pillar in his ever-present joy. For me, this place with its wind-blown, misted lakes and deep forests is a visible reminder of the spiritual life on this earth, this place of exile- it is as if the spiritual realities of beauty and simplicity, suffering and exile are here more visible than anywhere else I have ever been.
I came here afraid of the winter, and the Lord is making me face a deeper fear: that of being a saint. Part of me does not want to get tougher on myself; yet I sense the real and lasting joys, also visible to me in the chance to teach and help something worthy grow- namely, the Academy. I am like a flimsy and flapping tent in the wind, comparing myself to the large, bulky stone houses that stare back at the lake and the wind and defy it in the Lord’s strength. When I begin to see the reality of the saints, their inner strength and deep love of God, mirrored in the landscape and the lives of simpler people here, I realize what a city ninny I really am, what a spiritual weakling, what a fearful soul.
Perhaps if I make it through the winter, the spiritual one, I will be a saint. One can always hope, but not in my strength- I’ve California blood for a Canadian winter, and a sinner’s heart for reaching heaven. It will have to be God. I always knew this, but it seems very real to me now: my anti-strength for the journey. There is so much to be purified in His fire.
I remember about ten years ago, when I lived in Virginia, I read about the Madonna House and a description of Catherine Doherty. It may have been described in the article, I am not sure, but a real inner picture of a large and large-hearted woman, a huge mother-figure, stayed with me, and I imagined myself walking up through some tall and dark pine trees, up a path, to a small cabin wherein I would meet her; and something about my death and my desire towards sanctity crept in at the corners; and sometimes it seemed I was her. It was like a dream one has over and over, except in my imagination during waking moments. A few days ago I walked into that picture, but in reality- I walked on a path through tall and dark trees to a small cabin where she had lived for many years. I felt at home there, as if I’d really seen it before. So I hope she can, with her large and strong soul, pray for me, with my small and weak soul. It is essentially a choice to let go and let God, as they say; because I’ll end up in a hell of my own making if I try to do it myself (which I have been).
